Nvidia Corp, the dominant player in chips for artificial intelligence (AI) models, plans to produce as much as US$500 billion of AI infrastructure in the US over the next four years through manufacturing partnerships.
Production of Nvidia’s latest-generation AI chip, known as Blackwell, has begun at the new Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) plant in Phoenix, Arizona, the company said in a statement on Monday.
Nvidia is also building supercomputer manufacturing plants in Texas with Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) in Taiwan, and Wistron Corp (緯創).
Photo: Reuters
It is also partnering with Amkor Technology Inc and Siliconware Precision Industries Co (矽品精密) for packaging and testing operations in Arizona.
“Adding American manufacturing helps us better meet the incredible and growing demand for AI chips and supercomputers, strengthens our supply chain and boosts our resiliency,” Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in a statement.
The US$500 billion figure refers to the combined value of all the goods Nvidia anticipates selling in to the supply chain for AI. In large part, the number reflects a commitment from the biggest cloud computing companies to build out and upgrade data centers with the latest equipment.
That group, which includes Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Meta Platforms Inc, is expected to spend US$371 billion this year on AI facilities and computing resources, a jump of 44 percent from last year, according to a report published last month by Bloomberg Intelligence.
Nvidia also said the effort would mark the first time that AI supercomputers are produced in the US, a development that US President Donald Trump touted on Monday.
During an appearance at the White House, Trump said that Nvidia made the decision because of tariffs.
“It’s one of the biggest announcements you’ll ever hear — because Nvidia, as you know, controls that almost the entire sector,” he said.
Like other US investment pledges by large US technology companies, Nvidia’s outlay includes plans that were already underway. Still, it represents a win for the president’s agenda, City Index analyst Fiona Cincotta said.
“This is what Trump is aiming for,” Cincotta said on Bloomberg Television. “It is moving that manufacturing back to the US, which is what Trump has pledged.”
Nvidia shares were initially up in the wake of the announcement, before paring the gains. The stock is down 17 percent this year, part of a market rout that has hit technology shares especially hard.
Each Nvidia Blackwell chip costs tens of thousands of US dollars, with servers containing the semiconductors going for millions. Even at those steep prices, US$500 billion of AI hardware would represent a massive quantity of goods — potentially hundreds of thousands of AI-oriented servers.
“Mass production” at the Foxconn and Wistron plants is expected to ramp up in the next 12 to 15 months, Nvidia said in the statement.
Electronics players around the world, including chipmakers, are reeling from shifting new tariff policies from the Trump administration. Over the weekend, Trump pledged he would still apply tariffs to smartphones, computers and popular consumer electronics, downplaying an exemption issued on Friday last week as just a procedural step in his overall push to remake US trade.
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